When using Billy Grace, it's important to ensure UTMs are inserted on your ads and that the UTMs are getting tracked by our pixel. UTMs are essential, because with the information from the UTM we connect conversions measured by our pixel to sessions and your marketing efforts.
You can find the most update UTM parameters on the UTM page in the platform. Not sure where to put UTMs in the ad platform? You can find instructions per channel here.
In this article, we explain multiple cases:
Before contacting support about UTM issues, please make sure you've read and followed all steps below.
How do I see if UTMs are correctly coming in to Billy Grace?
If UTMs are added correctly to paid marketing channels, then you will see sessions coming in for your campaigns, adsets and ads. You can check this in Paid Performance. You could look at Yesterday and check the sessions and clicks from campaigns. Clicks are taken from the ad channel, while sessions are measured on your website with the Billy Grace pixel and UTM tags. This means that seeing that the clicks and sessions align is an indication that your UTM tracking is set-up properly. Be aware that you should also check whether this is working on campaign, adset and ad level, as it can be the case that UTMs are set-up properly at some ads, but not all of them, resulting in some sessions on campaign level, but missing session on ad level.
Example of correct measurement:
In the below example, you see clicks and sessions from campaigns, this is an indication that Billy Grace is receiving the right UTM parameters.
Examples of incorrect measurement:
If in the previous screenshot, a campaign was present with clicks, but with 0 sessions, then this is an indication that Billy Grace UTM parameters might be missing. In this case, you will get a UTM notification if a campaign has spend and clicks, but Billy Grace is not measuring any sessions.
This is visible under notifications in the top right corner:
By clicking on the message, you can see which campaigns probably have UTM issues.
Another indication of missing UTMs is having duplicate Channels showing up in Channel Performance. This might look like this:
In this example, part of the sessions and conversions of Google are measured correctly and combined with the integrated channel (connected to spend). However, on the second row there are also sessions coming from Google. This indicates that something might be going wrong with your UTM tracking.
Read further for a step-by-step guide on how to find why UTMs are not being received by Billy Grace.
UTM Troubleshooting
Follow these steps when you encounter a missing UTM message, or have campaigns / adsets / ads with spend and clicks, but without sessions.
1. Check if you have a correct template: A first step is to check in the ad manager whether the specific campaign has a correct Billy Grace UTM tracking template installed:
Does the campaign, adset or ad have a correct UTM template?
If yes, proceed to step 2
If not, proceed to this article to add the UTM template
2. Check if you have an UTM issue: Is there a correct UTM present, but in Billy Grace you get a UTM notification or a campaign, adset or ad isn't measuring sessions? Several items to control whether you have an UTM are:
Make sure that directly after the URL, UTMs start with a question mark. I.e.
<website url>?bg_source=...
If the Billy parameters are added behind an existing UTM they should start with a '&' sign. Example: <website url>?utm_source=demo&bg_source=...
If you've ensured that the UTM is structured correctly, you can navigate to the Troubleshoot Pixel page in Billy Grace. In the 'Received UTMs' tab you can see all unique UTM combinations received by Billy Grace in the last 7 days. If you do not see your UTM here, it generally means that it is not being sent to Billy Grace.
A useful analysis to do on this page is to see whether there is incoming traffic with default UTMs, but no bg_source, bg_source_id or bg_campaign. I.e. if you are sending utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc, but you have no data with bg_source=ga, your UTM tracking is incorrect.
Important: When you use autotagging in Google Ads, you might not have any default UTM parameters for Google Ads. Then spotting missing bg parameters is harder (read not possible) on this page for Google Ads. Other marketing channels should not be affected by this.
Based on these steps you should be able to conclude whether you have an UTM issue? Is it the case? Go to step 3!
3. Diagnosis of the UTM issue:
We generally see three common causes of UTM
The UTMs are not added to the specific ad / adset or campaign
The UTMs are added, but are stripped because of a website redirect
The UTMs are added, but are overridden because of UTMs on another level in the same ad manager (This can happen in Google Ads or Bing Ads)
To Troubleshoot if UTMs are not added in the ad manager you could:
Click around the ad manager on all available levels: Account, campaign, adset or ad until you find what overrides the UTM or see that a UTM is missing.
Try to trigger the campaign in Google / Bing and see live in the browser if the UTM is added. Read here how you can do this.
Troubleshoot UTM on live website
Website redirects
In order to check if UTM parameters are sent to Billy Grace and not stripped because of redirect, you can try to copy & paste the URL in your browser with a dummy UTM, for example:
Reload the page, is the UTM still present after reloading? Then there are no issues. Is the UTM being stripped from the URL? It is important to use the steps below to confirm that Billy Grace still receives your UTMs before the redirect happens.
If not, then probably a redirect on your website is stripping UTM parameters before they can be send to Billy Grace. Contact your web developer if this happens as this is a problem related to the website infrastructure.
It is also possible to see if the actual UTM parameter is sent to Billy Grace. In order to check that, open the 'developer console' by right click and select Inspect (in this example, I am using the Chrome browser).
Open the Network tab and search for "b.b"
Reload the page for the Network tab to start recording.
You now see the Billy Pixel firing:
Select the Payload tab and scroll down to the UTM parameters, here you can see the information that is sent to Billy Grace via default UTMs as in our example.
Or even the bg_source parameters in case of this URL:
Troubleshoot Google / Bing UTMs
In Google and Bing it is possible to add UTMs on account level. This is also the preferred way to install the Billy Grace parameters. Did you add the UTM parameters on account level but are still experiencing missing sessions from campaigns / adgroups or ads? Then usually this is caused by:
Another UTM on a lower level, this could be on campaign, adset or ad level. In Google and Bing the UTM parameters of the lowest level are used in the final URL.
Site links in your ads that do not include the Billy Grace parameters
Another UTM on a lower level
You can find out if this is the case by clicking through all campaigns, adsets and ads in Google. Or you can try to trigger the campaign with the missing parameters in Google.
You can do this by searching for keywords of a campaign in the Google Search engine.
In the above example, the first hit isn't an ad. But let's for now pretend it is. Click on the link and check if UTM parameters are present in the URL.
They are not, so probably something in the ad manager is causing the UTM to not be filled. This is always caused by a UTM on a lower level than the account level, which overrides the account level parameters.
If the problem persists without finding an additional UTMs in the admanager you can try:
Moving the Billy Grace parameters to the URL prefix field (instead of the tracking template)
Add the Billy Grace parameters on both account & campaign level.
Site links are missing UTM parameters
Usually, this problem occurs when the Billy Grace parameters are added to campaign / adgroup or ad level, while the Site links are created on account level. To solve this, you could add the UTM to account level or check the site link options in Google / Bing Ads.
Are your questions or specific use cases not answered after reading this article? Please contact our support team and we are happy to assist you.